FAQ (general)
Grambank is a global database of structural features of languages. Currently it contains over 2,000 languages and 195 features.
Grambank aims to provide a large amount of typological data on languages, as recorded in grammars and grammar sketches, that can be used to investigate deep language prehistory, geographical and historical grammatical patterns, language universals, cognitive or communicative constraints, the functional interaction of grammatical features and more.
Grambank is part of Glottobank, a research consortium that involves work on complementary databases of lexical data, paradigms, numerals and sound patterns in the world's languages. Grambank can be used in concert with other databases, such as those in Glottobank, to deepen our understanding of our history and communicative capabilities.
The maintenance and collection of data for Grambank is funded by the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Additional support, such as the hosting of coders, HR admin and the time of researchers, has also been provided by SOAS, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, the Australian National University, the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, the University of Colorado Boulder and Uppsala University.
Yes. As we learn more about the languages in our dataset, either by quality-control rechecking of existing datapoints, spot-checking or feedback from experts or signers/speakers, we will revise and update the dataset so that it is the best it can be.
If you want to contribute to improving our database by giving us feedback, please go to here.
Grambank is a part of the Cross-Linguistic Linked Data-project (CLLD). As such, there will continuously be new versions released. As with all CLLD-databases, it is important that you note down what version you have used in any analysis of the dataset.
Grambank version 1.0 has 2,430 languages in it. There are approximately 7,000 languages in the world, and out of those approximately 4,500 have grammatical descriptions that we can use as source material. We are adding new languages continuously, future releases will have more languages in it. We have not focussed on languages of Europe in our research plans, which is why for example Spanish and German are not included in the first release. We read grammars in many different languages, and there is no lack of material to include further languages - we just haven't gotten to them yet. Keep an eye out for future releases.
Thank you for wanting to help improve the quality of our data-set. Please let us know here.
The World Atlas of Language Structures was a project between 2000-2013 at the Department of Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. It consisted of many different scholars who collaborated on a joint database. Each chapter concerns different concepts and variables were coded by the authors of that chapter for a minimal set of 100 languages, and often many more.
Grambank is a project at the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. The project design consists of a questionnaire that is filled in as much as possible one language at a time by a set of trained student and research assistants.
The features in WALS and Grambank share similarities, but cannot be translated one-to-one. For example, Grambank contains several binary features asking for strategies for polar interrogation whereas WALS chapter 116 asks what the dominant strategy is.
There are many more similarities and differences between WALS and Grambank, but they can be considered "sister-databases" both in origin and spirit. Read the WALS chapters and Grambank feature descriptions to learn more about conceptual differences.